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representatives faced a reluctance to sell.
    ‘They told us that they had reserved it to build an aquarium. It’s a kind of craziness that reflected the real issue: ideologically they were very much against our organisations,’ said one Troika official.
    Greece though, was a ‘complete outlier’ with the biggest portfolio of assets to privatise of all the programme countries. Hotels, thermal springs, motorways, airports and lots of land. Land laws dating back to the Ottoman era meant that the Greek state inherited huge expanses of orphaned land and buildings. Not the Acropolis, or the islands, or the national parks, but land. No one knew exactly how much land, because the Greek state did not have a proper functioning land registry. At the IMF they thought the land holdings were worth up to 80 per cent of GDP. A seriously focused sale could have ‘dramatically’ reduced Greece’s national debt within two years, with some quick wins within months.
    A figure of €50 billion of land sales and privatisations was agreed with the Troika. By the end of 2012, however, almost nothing had been sold. Understandably, Greek politicians did not want to hold a fire sale at the bottom of the market. Equally, it was a vivid illustration that the Greeks were stalling. For their Troika overlords, it was part of a concerning pattern of behaviour. ‘The Greeks are very good at playing brinkmanship, you know,’ one former IMF Troika representative told me. ‘They say, “This is your problem not ours. You’ve got to give us the money anyway.” For both programmes they got the money at times when they should not.’
    This early type of drachmail threatened Europe-wide contagion in November 2011. Papandreou returned to Athens from a Brussels EU summit with a write-off of a third of Greece’s debts, in return for more reforms, cuts and taxes. But he felt that the incessant strikes and the strong domestic opposition to the plans were wrecking the Greek economy and making the country politically ungovernable. He called a referendum on the October deal to give some public legitimacy to the controversial austerity plans. Greece, the cradle of democracy, was to exercise people power ( demos kratos in Greek). But Papandreou had not consulted his own finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, nor anyone else in his cabinet. Nor had he consulted fellow EU leaders. Venizelos fell ill with appendicitis, and was obliged to telephone the German finance minister from hospital. (There appears to be something of a pattern of Eurozone finance ministers developing illnesses during periods of acute euro stress.) Papandreou’s gamble failed dismally. Elected in a landslide just two years previously, in the space of a week Papandreou was to be unceremoniously ejected from office.
    In Berlin, officials reflected on Germany’s response to these events. ‘At the EU Council in October we had the basic decision on PSI, to relieve Greece of €100 billion, very nice. And then Papandreou says that he doesn’t know if Greece can accept this, and he’s going to have to vote on it. We asked “What happened? Why didn’t he say this at the time?”’ The Germans believed that any referendum should be on whether Greece would fulfil the requirements of being in monetary union – not on the acceptability or otherwise of a specific bailout programme.
    So Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy summoned Papandreou and Venizelos to a dinner on the sidelines of the Cannes G20 Summit (Greece is not in the G20) on Wednesday, 2 November. It was, to say the least, an awkward occasion. There was no small talk; Merkel simply dictated terms. She told Papandreou that the referendum would be held quickly, the following month, and that the referendum was to be about Greece’s membership of the euro, not the bailout programme. An €8 billion tranche of EU funds to Greece would be postponed until after the referendum. She then announced all this publicly. President Sarkozy was